After Firefox again failed to build on my Linux box, I thought I'd never find a stable, compatible, full-featured web browser for Linux. Mozilla ![[WikiPedia]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
had the feature set covered, and the truetype Xft patch made it look nice, but performance was unusably slow. Konqueror is always interesting, but like the curse of Windows Explorer, it loads up all kinds of KDE stuff that I don't want. And as much as I enjoy the tiny and efficient Dillo browser, it isn't practical enough for daily use.
Since I've recently become hooked on the Opera [operaubuntufonts, opera, opera9, operastaticbin, opera-idstring, operamini41, linkstashbuttonsforoperawin764bit, badoperasites, operaminiusage, operamini4] browser under Windows, I thought I'd take a peek at the Linux version. Lo and behold, they wisely provide a static binary download that removes the hassle of Linux dependency hell. I untarred it, ran it in place, and it just worked. Fast. And identical to the Windows version. Wow.
Tip: For Linux, skip Opera's web download page, and just head to ftp://ftp.opera.com to get the right version.
